Sea floor at Vioska Knoll

Today was the last day of the cruise – the end of a great adventure. I was really fortunate today since I got to go on a second dive – to a place called Vioska Knoll, which was truly the most beautiful place that I have ever been. At the bottom, we landed in a vast field of white anemones and stalked white sponges, waving peacefully in the gentle current. We headed up a large hill (or knoll), towards towering coral colonies. Amongst colonies of white corals, we found stalked barnacles that resembled gooseneck barnacles, but were light brown and almost translucent. Besides the white corals, we also found black corals, which grow like trees underwater and can grow for thousands of years. The oldest black coral ever recorded was 4,265 years old! Because black coral is harvested and sold to make jewelry and it takes so long to re-grow, many black corals all over the world are being destroyed. We did our best not to disrupt this ancient undersea coral forest.

After the dive, students presented on projects that they had been working on over the last few weeks. I will tell you a little about one project that I was working on:

Deep Sea Clams Living on Tubeworms

We were interested in knowing whether larvae from deep sea animals can make their way from the deep cold water to the warm shallow water to feed. One way to find out is to see if they have enough energy to swim up thousands of feet. We measured the amount of oxygen that larvae use as they swim to help us figure out how much energy the larvae use each day. In tiny glass bottles, we put larvae from sea stars and tube worms that we raised from animals we collected in the sub. We recorded the amount of oxygen in the bottles using a sensor connected to a computer. Every few hours, we checked the oxygen level in the bottles to see how much energy the larvae had used. We ran the experiment at two temperatures: at deep sea temperature and at warm shallow water temperature, since larvae will use up more oxygen in warmer water. We’re working up the data now.

It was really exciting to hear about the projects of all of the other students onboard. We brought up many tubeworms from the bottom, and some of them have clams living on top of them. Recently, it was discovered that these clams feed on the eggs of the tube worms as they are released. Some students in the class found out that tube worms with clams have more eggs than tube worms without clams. We don’t know if the clams can choose a good worm to live on (one that would make lots of food) or if the tubeworm is trying to get the clams full so that the rest of the eggs can be released into the water.

In the evening, we had to pack many of the animals and larvae to take back to Oregon. Into eight large coolers, we packed up all sorts of animals, our treasures from the deep:

- bushes of tube worms

- a number of large crabs

-“snot worms”, which are pink segmented worms that live in mussel beds

-stalked barnacles from today’s dive

-white corals

-snails that were found living on the corals

-white egg masses from snails that are attached to tube worm tubes by thin stalks

-ribbon worms that are found living in crab egg masses

-egg masses from crabs, to feed the ribbon worms

-larvae from sea stars, tubeworms, ice worms and mussels

Back in Oregon, many of us plan to continue our studies of the deep sea with the animals that we bring back. They will live in a cold room at the temperature of the deep sea (8 to 12 degrees Celsius). We have lots more to learn about how they behave, reproduce, and survive at the bottom of the ocean.

Today I had the amazing opportunity to go down to the bottom of the ocean in the deep sea submersible. Not only that, but I got to sit in the front, inside the 5 inch thick glass ball that separates the pilot and the scientist from the crushing weight of 1700 feet of water above us!

The descent takes about half an hour, with light slowly fading until up looks the same as down. There are instruments and switches everywhere, lit up with red light, and the pilot controls the sub with a small control box, much like a video game controller. As we reach 1600 feet below the surface, the pilot switches off the air supply and a few other items so that we have enough power to get the big light on the sub turned on. The light stretches 40-50 feet into the penetrating darkness that surrounds us at the bottom of the ocean. There are beds of tubeworms all over the bottom, about a centimeter wide but several feet high, some taller than me. There are small red fish everywhere amongst the tubes, unsure how to react to light that they’ve never seen before.

We move slowly around, looking for tubeworms that have a certain type of clam living on top of them. A huge swordfish comes flying out of nowhere and slams into the ground right in front of us—the pilot says that they don’t like the light. As we move over an edge, we spot something amazing. There’s a large chunk of methane hydrate, which is bright yellow and is the solid form of the gas methane—some people call it methane “ice.” As we move closer, we see bubbles coming out of the ground and small red worms living in holes in the methane “ice.” These worms are the hard to find “ice worm,” an animal that gets its energy from methane-eating bacteria that live inside of it. We see a few other neat fish and a couple crabs as we continue to look around.

It was amazing to watch the robotic arm in action, and watch the pilot use the different tools that are attached to it. As we moved back up through the water, bubbles rose around us and light slowly appeared from above. It was an amazing experience!

Sunrise here on the boat has become my favorite part of the day. In Oregon, we get to see the sun set into the ocean, but here, we get to see it come up out of the ocean and slip back into the ocean at the end of the day! How cool is that? I didn’t get to see the sunrise today, though. I was up until 4 am working on my research (counting tubeworm eggs) so I slept in until 8. There are so many things to see and do here that I don’t want to sleep so that I don’t miss anything! Another benefit of getting up early is that the lab is empty then. By the afternoon, everyone is up and cozying up to each other in the tight lab quarters, which makes it so much more exciting- you never know when you’re going to collide with someone!

This morning the sub brought back the tubeworms and clams that I have been studying, so I was really excited! It’s always like Christmas when the sub comes up- everyone heads out to see the weird and interesting creatures brought up, and to get cold bottom-of-the-ocean water for the animals in the cold room. In the afternoon, we pulled up Dr. Bob Carney’s trap (kind of like a giant 80-pound crab pot!) that we had set out a couple of days ago. We dropped it off so that it could sit on the bottom of the ocean for a couple of days, and today we picked it up to see what we caught. I think we were all secretly hoping that a giant squid or a shark would be brought up with the trap, but there were only two small spindle-legged crabs and a hagfish oozing gobs of thick slime.

The rest of the day I worked on my research- making cultures of the eggs that were dissected out of the tubeworms, and counting the eggs to see how many of them are developing to form new tubeworms. Of course, I took some time off to watch the sub come up at night from the second dive and to enjoy the warm night and the lights from the oil platforms twinkling on the horizon.

I have been on many collecting trips – to the rocky shore, to the sandy beach, to the mudflats. But this was a very different sort of collecting trip. Instead of bringing along my rubber boots, rain jacket, and bucket, I brought along a video camera and clipboard to take lots of notes and record video. Instead of being able to stick my hands in the mud or lift up the rocks to find animals, I could only observe through a glass sphere and pick things up with a robotic arm. The site I went to is called Garden Bank and it was unexplored by any of the scientists onboard. My mission: to explore the area and record what I see.

The first sign of life at the bottom was a small white shell sticking up out of the mud. It turned out to be a carrier shell, which belongs to a snail that builds its shell by picking up pieces of other shells and sticking them onto itself. Next, we ran into a slope and when we made our way to the top, we found that it was an active mud volcano, bubbling with methane gas. The muddy seafloor was dotted with the occasional sea star, a few crabs, and beds of mussels here and there. But around the mud volcano, the mud looked flat and new, as if it had recently spewed out of the volcano and had not yet been inhabited by animals.

We came across what I thought was a pink anemone, but when we got closer, I noticed that it wasn’t just an anemone, but actually a hermit crab with an anemone living on its shell! Back onboard the ship, I found out that this kind of anemone, called a cloak anemone, attaches to a hermit crab’s shell and dissolves away the shell!

Myndee holding a bag of cups before they go down with the sub

Today we had some rough weather in the morning and there was a quick but intense storm around 6am. I was still asleep, but I felt the ship rocking more than usual from my bunk below deck. The sub recovery at 11:30am was one of the waviest ones we’ve had yet, and the swimmer had to work hard to not fall off as he tried to hook the sub up to the giant rope (probably the largest rope I have ever seen). The sub brought up a bunch of sea stars. We have them in the lab here on the boat and are trying to spawn them so we can look at their larvae (babies). After lunch, I helped with the CTD (see Sept 27 ship log) and we took samples from the big bottles that went down in the ocean and put them into small bottles. Then I helped pipet an even smaller amount (2 mL, less than ½ tsp.) of water from these small bottles into tiny vials. I got to use a cool syringe and had to wear gloves and change the tip after each sample, which made me feel pretty official. The oceanographers on board will test this water to find out what kinds of picophytoplankton are floating in the water at different depths. (Picophytoplankton are tiny photosynthetic algae– one thousand of them can fit on the head of a pin!) We are looking to see if we find any larvae at those depths. If you remember, one of the goals of our cruise is to determine what the larvae are eating.

On a dive the other day, one group brought up a watermelon sized chunk of carbonate, which is a rock of limestone (calcium carbonate) that was actually made by the bacteria using the methane bubbles on the ocean floor. With a chisel and hammer, we opened it to find out what animals were living in it. We found mostly worms, some crawling around and some in tubes going through the rock. The best part about this was that we got to hammer and chisel apart our rock while we were out on the deck watching the most beautiful sunset we have seen yet.

Bago of cups attached to the sub

Some of you have asked what is happening to the Styrofoam cups you decorated in class. Well, on the second sub dive today we sent down round one of the cups! We put them into a blue mesh bag with some paper towels inside so they wouldn’t get stuck together, and tied the bag onto the outside of the sub. Afterwards, a few of us brought them into the galley and sorted them and pulled out the paper towels. They all look really cool; we can’t wait to bring them back to you after their journey 2000ft down to the sea floor! What do you think they look like now?

Around 9pm, we all gathered on the bow of the ship for dive debriefings (when we talk about the dives) and a lecture. This cruise is a class for us, so we do research projects and have classes on deep sea biology. Nice class! It was a beautiful night, with an almost full moon and bright stars, and even some of the ship’s crew showed up to see our pictures. I talked about my dive yesterday morning and showed some cool movies of the corals, sea stars and fish we saw, and then we learned all about those picoplankton that we were using the CTD samples to count earlier in the day. They are tiny, green things that have a little whip-like strand (flagellum). After lecture, I spent some time out on deck enjoying the gorgeous night, and then a few of us colored our own Styrofoam cups to send to the bottom tomorrow!

My day started in the early hours of the morning, around 1 am. When I finished my work, I went for a stroll on deck. Little did I know that I was in for a spectacular show… it was like watching blue planet in real life! Flying fish were zipping straight out of the water and sailing like birds over the waves. I was standing at the stern (back) of the ship, when all of a sudden a flying fish lunged toward me, followed by two dolphins! What followed was a fast paced chase that ended up in some very happy dolphins, full after a meal of delicious flying fish.

After a few hours sleep I woke up early to watch Kristina’s second submarine launch. The crew told me if I put on a life jacket, I could watch up close, so I got to see every detail of the launch. The A-frame raised the sub clear above our heads and into the clear blue water. It seemed so big when I was standing under it!

Following the launch I worked on my project, studying baby barnacle larvae that hatched from adults we found on the spines of a deep-sea urchin. Barnacles on urchin spines! We were curious if these deep-sea baby barnacles (nauplii), that have only one eye, can sense light! To study this, Marley and I set up a tiny nauplius-sized arena to test our question. In the dark, we placed a flashlight at one end of a petri dish, and a nauplius larva in the center. After 5 minutes we checked to see in which direction our nauplius was swimming. So far, we think that these baby barnacles can sense light, but we don’t know why they have this behavior. What do you think?

After lunch we deployed the MOCNESS plankton tow to look at the types of larvae found at different depths in the water column. When the MOCNESS is brought up, it is our job to sort through the ‘plankton soup’ to look for larvae of deep-sea animals. We have 8 nets to look through, so it is a big job! We signed up for shifts and spent the rest of the evening taking turns sorting plankton. My favorite plankton were the tiny baby sea cucumbers and baby sea stars.

Later, scientist Kelly G. got an email that her son Kai lost his first tooth. We are too far away to talk by cell phone, so small email messages are usually the only way to talk to friends and family. However, since it was such a special occasion, the captain let her use the satellite phone to speak to him. She sends her love and can’t wait to see it in person!

Tube worms just brought up from the deep sea

I found out at lunch yesterday that there was a change in the schedule and that I would be diving in a couple of hours. I immediately got butterflies in my stomach. In a couple of hours I would be on the bottom of the ocean!! I felt like I was about to go to the moon. The time I had to wait before going in the sub seemed to last forever. Finally, I waved to my friends and climbed up the hatch into the sub. The opening to the sub is high up, so I had to step on something and hoist myself up. It is a tiny opening, so the two of us going in the back had to climb in one at a time.

As we went down, tons and tons of plankton and dead bits and sediment and detritus and bubbles swirled around the tiny window in the back of the sub where I was sitting. I could look closely and see all of the zooplankton swimming and floating by: tiny shrimp, copepods, and worms. After about 10 minutes, the light from the surface was all gone and the sub pilot left the lights off so we could see all of the bioluminescence. It looked like I was lying in a field at night looking up at really bright stars. But the stars were all alive and moving incredibly fast! The stars swirled and changed shape and zoomed past and exploded into a hundred little lights blinking on and off. I got a little dizzy watching, but it was so beautiful I couldn’t look away! When we started to approach the bottom, the sub pilot turned on the lights to the sub. It was really cool to see all the zooplankton swimming around and crowding around the light of the sub like moths do to a lamp at night. I even saw a tiny baby squid the size of my fingernail scoot past my window. I could hear the pilot talking over the radio saying that we were getting close to the bottom.

I was so excited to finally see what the bottom of the ocean looked like that I strained and craned my neck to see. Finally, a ghostly white, muddy bottom appeared. There were patches of tube worms, starfish, urchins, and lots of fish and crab. Everything was standing incredibly still! The crabs did not seem to move a claw, and even the fish hovered above with their still shadows on the muddy bottom. What an alien world! I can’t wait to go back down on my second dive.

Deploying crab and isopod trap

Today was a day of recovery for a lot of people. We keep hauling up really cool stuff from the sea floor with the sub ,and then run around trying to observe everything and do experiments with the animals. This is really exciting, and keeps most of us up really late. Today at 7:00 AM we woke up to wonderful pancakes with chocolate chips cooked by our fabulous chef G.B. I am going to miss him when we get home! Then at 8:00 AM it was time to see Myndee off as she went on her second trip to the sea floor. It is always so exciting to see the sub get launched! The machine they use to put the sub in the water is huge, and it is really cool to see it lift up the whole sub, with all four people inside. The rope it uses is as big as my head! Then all morning it is cool to know that your friend is cruising around the ocean floor. At lunch I found out that there had been a change in the schedule and I was going to be going down in the sub on the afternoon dive! I immediately had butterflies in my stomach and was nervous and really excited! I’ll talk about my dive in my dive log tomorrow, now I’ll talk about the ship.

Lecture on the deck of the ship

After I got back to the ship, we had a lecture on the bow (front of the ship). It was fun to have class outside on the deck of the ship at night under the stars. The warm breeze helped keep us all awake even though we were all tired from doing research and staying up late. There is just so much to see, and it is so exciting to be on this ship and going down in the sub and seeing all of the cool animals we bring up, that it is REALLY HARD to get to bed at a normal hour!

Later on at night, members of the ship crew were fishing off of the boat and saw some flying fish and called us out to look. We saw two dolphins chasing the flying fish, and one of the fish “flew” right onto the boat! The crew is going to use this fish as bait to hopefully catch a tuna or something else really big!

Each day this week I’ve stood on deck, waiting for the sub to come up. When it does, I wave to the cockpit and am excited just to know the people in it. I always wondered how much more exciting it must be to actually be in the sub, and wondering “why are all those people waving at me?” Yesterday I got my chance.

I was not in the cockpit of the sub but the room in the back. I had always thought of it as being the “trunk” of the sub, but it turned out to be quite spacious. There were even pillows and blankets back there! I shared the room with Frank, the technician, while Bob (the scientist) rode in front with Craig (the pilot) in the cockpit, which was a separate room. As we waited to reach the bottom, lying there on blankets, Frank with a book, and me by the window, I almost got the feeling that we were at a sleepover on the bottom of the sea. But that was a silly idea, because once we reached the bottom, we had a lot of work to do. My job was to write down everything we saw. So in fact it was not at all like a sleepover, but more like a class. I was taking notes in the great dark classroom of the deep sea.

Our mission was to survey the brine pool, the same famous undersea landmark that was featured in the Blue Planet series. An underwater “lake”, the supersalty water was opal-blue and very still. It reminded me of the lake of the dead from the Harry Potter books; it even had pale white bodies that sailed through it. These weren’t zombies, but the bodies of fish that had been unlucky enough to swim into the salty death trap.

A few years ago, Bob had placed boxes of rabbit food near the brine pool. This crazy idea was actually a carefully planned experiment. Over time the rabbit food would rot, and become covered by bacteria. Many deep sea creatures eat nothing but bacteria, so this could attract animals from far and wide. Near the boxes, we encountered a crab with a four foot claw span and Craig managed to capture it in a large box by skillfully using the sub’s robotic arm. We also spotted some deep sea ratfish, venus-flytrap anemones and a whole lot of mussels. After three hours, it was time to return to the surface, and we bid this strange underwater world goodbye.

I pulled myself up and into the back of the sub, took my shoes off, wrapped myself in a blanket, and lay down so that my face would be next to the tiny porthole. I put my headset on and made sure my notebook and pencil were ready to write down everything I saw. As the sub slid into and under the water we were surrounded on all sides by bubbles, as if we were going through a car wash. The deeper we got the darker and colder it got, and so I layered on more clothes: my gloves, a scarf, a hat, an extra pair of socks, and another sweatshirt. When it was completely dark, the small animals in the water would wiz past us, glowing and flashing us with their bioluminescence like dancing stars. I can see how animals could be dazzled by this display and become something’s unsuspecting prey.

As we got to the ocean bottom (2180 feet deep) we came upon an underwater lake. A lake. UNDERWATER! Scientists have named this a brine pool. The water is very salty and very heavy; so heavy that it can’t mix with the surrounding sea water. There it has to stay: a pool of salty water under an already salty ocean. What’s even more incredible is that surrounding this lake a beach made of mussels has formed, making it impossible to see the muddy ocean floor. As the submersible glided over the lake and stopped in the middle, I could see through my porthole red shrimp, orange crabs, black mussels, brown snails, pink sea stars, grey eels and…a chubby white octopus. There it was, moving like a ghost over the center of the brine pool. Instead of shooting off quickly into the dark or squirting us with ink, it hovered close by. I could see its’ yellow eyes and light pink tentacles.

Our mission on the dive was to take mussels from different parts of the mussel bed, scoop up mud at the edge of the brine pool, and get a sample of the really salty water of the brine pool. The driver was so practiced at moving the robotic arm and the vacuum hose that this took no time at all. Then we were free to go exploring for more animals: a bright orange fish with a fat head waiting on the muddy sea floor, white long tubes housing long purple worms, rattail fish. And then all of a sudden, we had to go back to the surface- we had been there for 3 hours! We turned off all of the lights and the creatures outside my porthole streaked by again bursting with light.